TLDR: webp has been enabled as the default way to...

Text - Aug 24, 2019

hi everyone. absolutely awful news for all giffers!

TLDR: webp has been enabled as the default way to display gifs within web pages on not only chrome, but now firefox as well. this affects everything including the tumblr dashboard. that means your beautiful gifs will display improperly and look hideous on almost everyone’s browsers by default. this can also affect the upload process on tumblr (gifs permanently converting to webp). pixel/retro gifs are especially ruined by this.

SOOOOO i just went through hours of hell trying to figure out why tumblr was converting my 168k pretty gif as a 1mb hideous blurry webp. this was happening on desktop (firefox 68.0.2) as i uploaded it.

well turns out that google is spreading it’s diseased buggy webm/webp compression format as a sort of new “standard”, and firefox has stupidly enabled it as the default with it’s most recent update. and it was not only displaying all gifs as ugly webp (have fun saving em to your hd), but actually UPLOADING them as webp files as well.

example of first frame of gif animation as GIF (clear, vibrant, beautiful, no visible compression, perfectly square pixels, zero distortion, total filesize of 167k):

example of first frame of same gif animation as WEBP (blurry, dull, ugly, extremely visible compression, fuzzy pixels, bad distortion, total filesize of 1mb):

(the actual webp in motion looks 100x worse than the still image example).

i solved the display and upload issue on my firefox by typing “about:config“ into my address bar. searching for “image.http.accept“ and then deleting “image/webp,*/* => */*” from the entry.

so now on MY specific browser i am no longer displaying gifs as webp, and all gifs uploaded to tumblr stay as GIFS instead of auto-converting to goddamn webp. the continuing MAJOR problem is 99.9% of the people LOOKING at my content are still using browsers that default all gifs on here to webp. meaning any gif i upload, regardless of the quality, will look like absolute shit to them.

this has probably been the case for chrome users for a while… ironically the stupid app still displays gifs as gifs? though (old news) it compresses gifs badly and hyper-compresses all images that you use it to upload so it almost doesn’t matter.

so far it seems like still image formats like png have not been affected. at least on firefox. on chrome i’ve noticed some cases where png will be displayed as jpg for no good reason? hopefully it’s just a fluke on my end but… i fully expect google to standardize unnecessary and awful still image compression in the future as well.

so hey thanks to easily the most evil current tech corporation?
OUR ART IS TOTALLY FUCKED.

(i did a lot of research/testing to figure this stuff out today, but i could be wrong about a few things. if anyone else knows what the hell is going on, please tell me. i really want to be wrong about this. this feels like a nightmare. i only just got back into giffing again in past few months, but this alone would kill my art dead.)

webp google tumblr gifs i don't even know what to do about this please look into this even if it's old news the gif i posted above this should display as perfect quality on your browser if it doesn't your browser is fucked over by the webp thing